How to start a gutter cleaning business and make $10,000/month

If you’re looking for a way to make money NOW and start a business doing something that every house needs, listen up.

Gutter cleaning has easily made me over a hundred thousand dollars and I’m gonna show you how you can start your own business that could potentially make you over $10,000 per month.

When I was dead broke a few years back this was how I started making money fast, got on my feet, and built a business that makes over 6 figures a year.

It’s very simple so let’s dive into it.

First, if you’re reading this I’m gonna assume you live in an area that already has houses with lots of gutters, gutters mean you get rain in your city.

Without rain and trees, this business doesn’t exist. So if your city is dry as a desert you should start a solar panel or a window cleaning business or something else instead.

Gutter’s primary job is to keep water away from the house and the foundation.

When working properly, a gutter collects the rain from the roof of a home or building and deposits it somewhere farther away so it doesn’t flood the basement or flow down the side of the house and cause mold and rot.

When gutters get clogged, most commonly by leaves, needles, and pinecones all that water can start to overflow and that gutter now needs t be cleaned as soon as possible.

With me so far?

In most places, gutters should be cleaned at least once per year but sometimes as many as 2 or 3 times per year. It all depends on your area and how many trees are close by.

So, your job as a potential gutter cleaner is to make sure that all the gutters on a house are flowing and doing their job. All you need to do is clean them out by grabbing all of that crap with your hands and putting it in a bucket, tossing it in the woods, or even using a leaf blower (if its dry) and blowing everything out.

If you haven’t seen someone doing this before here’s a video of me up on a roof cleaning some gutters.

The cleaning part is easy. It doesn’t take a level 180 IQ, it just takes someone not afraid to get their hands dirty, and ideally isn’t much afraid of heights.

A couple tips before moving onto the actual business part:

Get a good ladder. A good ladder is solid, adjustable and will be the most important part of being safe.

Get a good leaf blower. This isn’t the time to cheap out. When used right a $220 leaf blower can make you ten times that amount very quickly.

Never leave a mess. People are hiring you for a reason: to make their lives easier. Don’t inconvenience them by leaving crap everywhere.

Cool?

So for the business part, this is where the magic happens.

As mentioned the work is not very complicated. A bonobo monkey could probably figure it out and do just a good a job as 90% of people. It’s the getting of consistent leads and clients that most people fail.

As a businessman, your #1 job is now to get more clients and do the best damn job anyone around does.

To get more jobs you need to be in as many places as physically possible. Not necessarily YOU but a way that people can start to learn about you and what you do. My favorite ways are with Facebook ads and optimizing my website for Google SEO.

More on that another time.

The point is you need to get your business in front of as many damn eyeballs as possible.

Other ways you could do this could be Craigslist, Door knocking, Facebook groups, a damn hot air balloon across the sky if you had one.

People need to know you. And the easiest way to get them interested is have an offer that anyone can understand. For gutters a $199 or $99 gutter clean special will oftentimes do the trick.

Obviously you can upsell other services later but we need a small digestible offer that people will find enticing so that we can build momentum, get reviews, photos, and videos of our work. We can leverage this stuff later.

Right now you need to get your first couple jobs by any means necessary. My first job was cleaning my grandma’s gutters and pressure washing my dad’s sidewalk!

Go talk to your neighbors, friends, family, church members do one or two for free if you have to.

Once you have some experience and some momentum then you can start charging people.

Door-knocking is a great strategy once you’re already working in a neighborhood.

It can be as simple as knocking on the door and saying “hey we’re cleaning Susans gutters down the street would you guys be interested in a quick price as well?”

This early stage takes the most grit. Learning how to keep your calendar booked is the hardest part but if you study and learn you will see there is a ton of ways to make sure you stay busy.

To get more jobs you either need to spend time or money. Door-knocking spends time, while something like Facebook ads or Google ads spends money.

When you can it’s always better to spend money rather than time. Money is unlimited, but we only have so much time. In the beginning doing some door to door yourself is just fine but if you’re still using it after 6 months you need to wakeup and build a business that brings jobs to you and doesn’t cost any of your time.

This is stuff like website SEO, referrals, and a decent social media presence. You want to start to dominate your city. Anytime someone even thinks the words “gutter cleaning” and types them into Google your website needs to start popping up.

But that will come in time. Right now start getting your first jobs and build the rest once you start bringing in income.

From here the math is very simple. My average gutter clean is usually $200 but I’ll almost always upsell a roof clean or something else and bring that ticket price up to $400 on average.

For $400 all we need is 25 jobs in a month, 25 measly jobs! And you can make six figures a year. Each job never should take more than an hour or two.

Even if you don’t upsell and just clean the gutters for $200, there’s no reason you can’t clean 2 per day and still make that daily $400 bucks and hit our $10,000 goal.

Once you have that consistent revenue and jobs you should also start to hire people to do the work for you and just take a cut. Now you’re providing jobs, a useful service, and making money all at the same time.

That’s all I’ll cover for now, if you want to learn more for free go check out the rest of my blog or Youtube channel and when you’re ready join my Home Service Business Mastermind Inner Circle to be surrounded by other men on the same mission. 

See you there my friend…

-Spencer Claeys